Since we refreshed our gaming benchmark suite, we've had to start from scratch on our gaming charts. Unfortunately that means we've seen two GeForce GTX 580-based systems and a single GeForce GTX 555, which is the reason why the "Unknown Sample" with its Radeon HD 7970 has been included. The recent Skyrim 1.4 patch and high resolution texture pack also invalidated some of our test results with AVADirect's silent gaming system, so those have been omitted.

The GeForce GTX 580 may be in its last days, but it's still plenty of graphics card for our 1080p testing suite. Hopefully Kepler will bring support for three displays with it, because gaming technology just hasn't been keeping up with the performance available from our current graphics hardware at this resolution. Even QWXGA and QHD (e.g. 30" and 27" high-resolution displays) can generally run off a single GTX 580 or HD 7970 with all the settings cranked up.

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I'm not a big fan of the look of the case but the support for high-end graphics cards makes this a much more viable system than the Alienware X51. This could be a good option for gamers who don't build their own systems and don't want to pay the boutique prices.Reply

In the case of the power supply, "Custom" just means it's not any specific brand and we don't know who makes it or whether it's 80 Plus/Bronze/Silver/Gold. AFAIK, both Dell and HP have long since abandoned their proprietary power supply connectors. The motherboard on the other hand is likely BTX, which would mean using anything else in the case likely wouldn't work. Dustin would have to confirm this however.Reply

Well, you could probably build one yourself a bit cheaper, but without adding up the numbers probably not a lot cheaper. Remember that the i7-3960x CPU alone is $1049 on NewEgg. And the cheapest x79 motherboard is $204. Cheapest Gtx 580 is $459. So just with those three components you would be over $1700.

So I don't think its particularly over priced for an OEM System. Reply

Of course, the GTX 580 is no longer even an option at HP, and the same goes for the 160GB SSD (at least on the model I selected) so we'd be looking at GTX 550 Ti and a 256GB SSD in it's place. You can get that configuration for $2559 from HP. Making similar changes to the Newegg order, we end up with $2379.

Either way, it looks like HP is charging a premium of about $300 to build and configure their systems at the very high end. If you go with something more reasonable (like the i7-2600 h9t model), the price difference is more like $200 over building it yourself. It's not an awesome deal, but it's also not bad either -- pretty much in line with what you'd pay at a boutique.Reply